September's video releases feature three summer blockbusters full of action and effects: “Star Trek Into Darkness,” “World War Z” with Brad Pitt vs. zombies (with theatrical and “director's cut”), and Robert Downey Jr. in “Iron Man 3.” The last was by far the highest earner.

The highest-grossing film in Japan (in 2011) was “From Up on Poppy Hill,” a delicate animated tale written by Hayao Miyazaki and directed by his son Goro Miyazaki. It's a sweet, squeaky-clean, beautifully painted coming-of-age story about a teenage girl in 1963. She kind of likes the boy who's saving a building from demolition, but their friendship may have a hitch. The film is like a soothing, breezy vacation.

Pablo Berger's “Blancanieves” (“Snow White”) swept Spain's Goya Awards. Told with visual wit as a black-and-white silent film (like “The Artist” but truer to the era), it reimagines the fairy tale in terms of '20s Seville and the world of bullfighting, with the heroine even named Carmen. Maribel Verdu (“Pan's Labyrinth”) is the purse-lipped, outrageously clad evil stepmother. The ending is appropriate to a country with civil war on the horizon.

From the actual '20s comes the wonderful “Treasures New Zealand,” a three-hour trove of previously lost films located in that distant film archive. The two short features are amazing. “Upstream,” a comedy of folks in a theatrical boarding house, is directed vividly and gracefully by John Ford, while the incomplete “The White Shadow” was scripted and edited by Alfred Hitchcock. It features a dual role for Betty Compson as good and wayward twins in Paris.

Among the shorts, “Andy's Stump Speech” is a hilarious, bizarre slapstick based on the comic strip “The Gumps,” and “The Love Charm” features beautiful early Technicolor in a Hawaiian setting. There's also animation, newsreels, a serial chapter and a look at how hats are made. A booklet of excellent notes rounds out a fine package.

More beautiful and graceful visuals combine with sensitive character study in Satyajit Ray's “Charulata” and “The Big City,” now available from Criterion. Both center on performances by Madhabi Mukerjee as women coming to awareness of their new potential in a transitional society. “The Big City” is one of the loveliest and most finely detailed marital dramas ever. It comes with a bonus film, “The Coward,” starring the same actress as a married woman who encounters her first love.

Criterion also has Ernst Lubitsch's “To Be or Not To Be,” a daring anti-Nazi comedy-adventure starring Jack Benny and Carole Lombard as married actors who get mixed up with spies in wartime Poland. It was remade by Mel Brooks, but be sure to check this original, once-controversial classic; a bonus disc has a documentary on Lubitsch, plus one of his short films from 1916.

Reissues

Rainer Werner Fassbinder was incredibly prolific and experimental in a bold, low-budget way, focusing on lowlifes and others on society's fringes. “Early Fassbinder” collects five features from 1969-70 that were on DVD years ago but went out of print: “Love Is Colder Than Death,” “Katzelmacher,” “Gods of the Plague,” “The American Soldier” and “Beware of a Holy Whore.” All are dark and cynical, and the last is an especially random explosion about a film crew falling apart under a crazy director.

Kino and Redemption continue to issue definitive, newly mastered HD versions of '60s and '70s Euro-horror, including Jess Franco's seminal Spanish Gothic “The Awful Dr. Orloff,” his hallucinatory “A Virgin Among the Living Dead” (a preferred cut drops the zombies) and the captivating “Nightmares Come at Night,” in which nothing happens — but so beautifully. One mesmerizing close-up of the heroine through a car window seems to show her snow-white face disappearing like the Cheshire Cat except for black eyeliner.

Also, Mario Bava's “Five Dolls for an August Moon” is a strikingly designed, modern whodunit, while “A Bay of Blood” is arguably the earliest modern body-count slasher movie, and the most ingenious. All these are crammed with extras.